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Tag Archives: Hootsuite

Hootsuite, a managing platform for social media, was started in 2008 by Ryan Holmes. Mr. Holmes is still the CEO of this now international company located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The name, Hootsuite, came from a play on words from the French, “tout de suite” meaning “right now”. There are presently branches in London, Singapore and many other countries. This is a rapidly growing company, and as of 2014 there were 15 million users in 175 countries. Undoubtedly these numbers are greatly outdated by now. In addition, the Hootsuite website advertises numerous job openings to join over 1,000 already working there.

What’s so great about this company? They have made posting to social media easy and effective. Presently anyone can post to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Google+. Through integrations using Hootsuite’s App Directory, one can also post to Reddit, Storify, Tumblr and Marketo. This is done through a dashboard on which the user selects the social media and the frequency of posts (twice per day, three days per week, for example). After writing the short post and including an image if desired, the post is “Auto Scheduled”. The post take about 15 minutes for a week’s post.

In addition, the company introduced 3 plans last year to make it easier for everyone – Free Plan (for the individual), Pro Plan (small business) and Enterprise Plan (larger business). The customer service is quite efficient, even for the free plan, which can be accessed by e-mail. There are numerous tutorials, including videos, and the dashboard is well laid out.

Lastly, Hootsuite keeps up with the changes in the various social media platforms and notifies its customers when changes happen. Recently (July 2017) Facebook discontinued customising link previews from other sources in order to reduce the misrepresentation of any link. Hootsuite posted a notice and notified customers.

There is some evidence that posting with Hootsuite can reduce the number of responses since they are automated posts. It seems unlikely as the number of posts possible would certainly increase the number of people viewing posts. As someone who has used Hootsuite for several years now I appreciate the time it saves me and the ease of posting to numerous sources. There are some competitors that have appeared such as Spredfast and Tweetdeck. However, Hootsuite continues to grow and provide good customer service at the same time.